The Bus Doesn't Stop Here

By Sam Allis

The 6600 block of South Ellis Avenue anchors one of Chicago's scarier neighborhoods. Students who attend the Alexandre Dumas Elementary School located there have had their $100 Nike sneakers stolen off their feet on the way to class in the morning. Drugs are everywhere. "It's a constant battle for the children to get here," says principal Sylvia Peters, who oversees the institution's 682 pupils and 40 teachers.

Dumas is a 100% black inner-city public school, the kind of place that has an appalling reputation. By all rights, things should be just as bleak inside the scarred cinder-block building as outside. But there are no graffiti on the walls, no violence in the halls. Attendance thus far this year is an astonishing 94%, and there are 70 students on a waiting list to get in. "Black parents who bused their kids are coming home," says Peters, 52, a no-nonsense veteran educator who will begin her seventh year on the job in January.

Dumas is becoming a symbol of a growing belief among blacks that busing is not the solution to the ferocious problems afflicting inner-city schools. In the past, all-black schools were considered by many blacks and white liberals an anathema to be destroyed by court order. No longer. They are a growing phenomenon in urban America, as whites continue to flee to the suburbs. Unlike the institutions created by the forced segregation that existed until the Supreme Court outlawed the practice in 1954, these schools are a function of changing demography, not of statutes. Disillusioned and frustrated by the failure of busing to improve the quality of education for their children, black parents are leading the fight for good black neighborhood schools like Dumas. "There's nothing wrong with them if it's simply a matter of geography," says black Boston state representative Byron Rushing.

The fact that Dumas is all black matters little to students and parents. What matters is that, unlike many schools, it is trying to be excellent. "As a black American, I want the best education money can buy at this school," says Peggie Bartlett, president of the Dumas local school council, the institution's governing board. "I don't care if white folks don't come down here." Says Sokoni Karanja, a community leader: "Integration never really made any sense for quality education. I've got four kids who never were bused. I would just go into schools and kick behinds to get higher standards."

Principal Peters chafes at the notion of the integrated classroom as the sole avenue to sound education. "Forget the idea that black children can't learn unless they're sitting next to a white child," she argues. "Some values are universal, like self-love, respect, integrity and perseverance." She incorporates seven such principles into a candle-lighting ceremony at the beginning of each school year for the new eighth-graders. "We tell them, 'This is your beginning of becoming young black adults. There is nothing wrong with you.' "

Peters also kicks behinds. "Our kids are no different when you instill the work ethic and tell them, 'You've got to move your buns.' " Students will start wearing uniforms in January. They listen to Mozart in music class and begin Latin in the fifth grade. James Coleman, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago, argues that black schools can challenge black youngsters in ways integrated ones cannot. "You can make very strong demands on the kids. They can't blame it on whites," he explains. "In integrated schools, white teachers are often afraid to make strong demands on black kids." At Dumas, that means offering sympathy that a student's parents had a fight the previous night but then insisting on the need to do one's homework anyway. Bart Simpson, in short, is a lousy role model; try Martin Luther King.

Dumas is far from perfect: its students still test below the Illinois state average; its physical plant is fraying; services are bad. "They send me inferior hamburger, moldy bread, spoiled milk," fumes Peters. But Dumas, with its emphasis on bootstrap help, is light-years ahead of most black public schools in the U.S. "There are several hundred black schools in Chicago alone, and most of them are still doing terribly," says Gary Orfield, a visiting professor at Harvard's graduate school of education.

Some blacks and a lot of whites are concerned that all-black schools amount to debilitating racial isolation. Stan Conner, whose grandchild attends Dumas, concedes, "You don't know whites on a personal basis. You grow up more isolated." Sociologist Coleman believes integrated summer camps could help offset the classroom separation. Students themselves are unconcerned. "We're not prejudiced," shrugs eighth-grader Keith Harris, 12. "White kids are welcome here."

Most black parents are far more concerned about good teachers, discipline and curriculum. And it is parental involvement that makes Dumas special. Upwards of 60 parents (all women) volunteer on any given day to work as teacher's aides, help out in the cafeteria or cut up frogs for biology class. It's 9 a.m., and they know what their children are doing. So does Sylvia Peters, who tries to keep discreet tabs on the sexual activity of her seventh- and eighth-graders. She proudly cites a lone pregnancy during her tenure.

Yolanda Raddle, a Dumas parent, marvels that her daughter Danielle, 6, can recite two poems by Langston Hughes, the gifted black writer. "I never heard of him in high school," she says. Dumas has already made a difference.